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Brad's Blog |
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| Author: | Brad Miller | Created: | 10/30/2007 2:51 AM |  | | From the Desk of Brad Miller |
| How Important is the Bible? | |
Mid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/30/2010 8:11 AM | |
| Greetings!
I gave up a long time ago recommending movies to people because I discovered that movies that I find riveting don’t always hit other people the same way. (Isn’t that right Rev. Jennifer?) These days the only two movies I wholeheartedly recommend are “Field of Dreams” (especially for fathers, sons, and baseball fans) and “Ordinary People”, a profoundly real movie about the pain and heartbreak and joy of life in late 20th century America. Those are probably my two favorite movies of all time, although any good (or bad for that matter) Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn or Cary Grant movie is always a good bet.
Now, all of this is my way of leading to saying that I saw a movie this week that got me to thinking, but this is not, I repeat, this is not a recommendation for people to see it. Some might like it; many would not. Having said all that, I recently saw a movie called “The Book of Eli” starring Denzel Washington. It was one of those p ... |  | |
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| | Sunday June 27, 2010 "Don't Look Back" Luke 9:51-62 | |
| By Brad Miller on6/30/2010 8:03 AM | |
| In C.S. Lewis classic book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, there comes a time when Aslan, the Christ-like lion king, begins his movement toward the climactic final confrontation with the evil forces threatening the kingdom of Narnia. Throughout this portion of the book, the refrain echoes throughout the land, “Aslan is on the move.”
In the scripture we heard read this morning, I am reminded of Aslan. It seems plausible to me that in the period when these events took place in the ministry of Jesus that his followers might have spread the news across Palestine and Israel: “Jesus is on the move.” They might not have understood what he was moving toward, but they probably knew that something was different; something was about to happen.
Beginning with chapter 9 of Luke and continuing for about 10 chapters, we are presented the gospel account of Jesus’ final journey toward Jerusalem. Most of these stories are found only in Luke’s gospel and while the sto ... | | |
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| | Blessings | |
| By Brad Miller on6/23/2010 3:12 PM | |
| Greetings on this first full day of summer,
I like to keep things neat and in order. I say, I like to, but that doesn’t always mean I do. Oh, I do well at home. I don’t like dishes to pile up in the sink, so I make sure to clean up after dinner and load the dishwasher and wash the pots and pans. I like things to be in order when I get up in the morning, which means I try to put things in place before I go to bed at night. I just don’t like a lot of clutter in the house. But my desk in my office at the church is a different story.
Like many of you, massive amounts of paper cross my desk every day. The really critical stuff gets dealt with immediately; the stuff I’m working on in the short term goes into a special folder; but what to do with all that other stuff? Some of it can go directly into the recycling box under my desk. Some of it goes to other people. But a lot of it is sort of in that in between, gray area. Might be useful someday…looks interesting ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 20, 2010 "Deep Calls to Deep" Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 | |
Brad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on6/23/2010 3:08 PM | |
| “Deep calls to deep.”
I remember the first time I heard this phrase, and I was a little mystified. When I was a kid, before we asked the blessing and ate, someone read a devotional for the day which included a scripture and a short reflection. On this certain day, Psalm 42 was the scripture and I really didn’t know what it meant, this idea of “deep calls to deep.” I remember not wanting to ask right at that moment, mainly because I was hungry and wanted to get to dinner, but after the blessing and as we were eating I asked what it meant.
My brother said he thought it meant something “really heavy was going on.” Which wasn’t a lot of help. My father said he thought that it meant that when things start to go wrong, there is a tendency for us to let things go from bad to worse. My mother said she thought it meant that when things are going really, really wrong, when we are in the deepest pain, we call out to the deepest source of hope we know, God.
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| | Facing Fear | |
Mid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/22/2010 2:18 PM | |
| Greetings on another steamy day,
Recently Carol and I went to a play in which one of the characters uttered this line: “It scares me so much that I just know I have to do it.” As the line was delivered, I knew that even though it got a big laugh from the audience, it was profound and instructive beyond the attention given it. It was used to illustrate what a free spirit the person who uttered it was and it served it’s purpose well. It got me thinking about times I had stepped up to my fears, and what the result of that was.
When I was about 14 our Boy Scout troop was chosen as the Governors Honor Guard, which meant that we got to spend two weeks on Mackinac Island in a barracks behind the Governors summer residence. We put up the flag every morning, we worked as guides in Fort Michilimackinac, we got to meet the governor and his wife, and each day about 3:00 we got to go to the Grand Hotel swimming pool. The Grand Hotel is an enormous turn of the century hot ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 6, 2010 "Are You Happy?" Psalm 146 | |
Mid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/8/2010 1:49 PM | |
| We live in a society that holds happiness as one of the great goals of life. Our marketing culture points to happiness with almost every advertisement we see. You certainly can’t be happy unless you have the latest, the most stylish, the fastest, the cleanest, the tastiest, the best. Our consumer culture is based on the notion that we need things to be happy.
But it goes even deeper than that. We look to our leaders to provide that happiness, too. Every election cycle, which now is every day of every year, we see people running for office that market themselves much like Madison Avenue markets consumer goods. And what they are selling is the fact that their candidate can make us happy. Oh, this is not a new phenomenon: from the 1920’s on, the theme song for one of our two major political parties has been “Happy Days are Here Again!”
It’s not just our leaders and our consumer culture that places such a big emphasis on happiness. How many parents have told ... | | |
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| | Sabbath | |
Mid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/3/2010 2:15 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day,
I got a new phone a while back.
Oh, it’s not just any phone, it’s the phone that George Jetson could only dream about. On this phone I can check the weather, the stocks, the scores of the Tigers game, answer my e-mail, surf the web, get a joke of the day, a Bible verse a day, tune my guitar (like anyone would notice), order movie tickets, read the newspaper – the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press and the USA Today – read a book, listen to music, watch a tv show, keep my calendar, use it as a compass, use it as a flashlight, use it as a level, get new recipes, check the time in Brussels (hey, I might want to, I have a friend there) play solitaire, find a restaurant, look at a picture of my house from space, look at a picture of your house from space, read a book, add more cowbell whenever needed, identify music on the radio just by holding it up to the speaker, locate my car in a mall parking ... | | |
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| | Sunday May 30, 2010 "Many Things to Say" John 16: 12-16 | |
Brad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on6/2/2010 9:15 AM | |
| One of the friends I met in seminary, Drew Johnson, could always be counted on to sum things up succinctly and accurately. He was one of those people who didn’t always get the highest grade in the class, but it always seemed like he understood things better than anyone. I can still remember sitting in the lounge at Candler, discussing some of the more difficult issues that arose in our classes and how his take on it almost always illuminated my thinking.
After a weekday worship service where the preacher’s message was an exploration of the trinity and our understanding of it, we were on our way to lunch, both deep in thought. Drew broke the silence of our walk by asking, “You know why we only celebrate Trinity Sunday once a year, don’t you?” I responded that I did not. “Because,” he said, “if we spent any more time than that trying to figure out the trinity, our heads would explode.”
Well, it’s Trinity Sunday. And exploding heads or not, it is something tha ... | | |
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| | Sunday May 6, 2010 "Building on the Foundation" First Corinthians 3: 10-13 | |
Brad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on6/2/2010 9:12 AM | |
| How exactly did we get here?
There have been several times in my life when I have asked variations of that question. Sometimes, it was out of a sense of frustration as in, “How did I get myself into this mess?” Sometimes it has been out of sense of confusion and despair as in, “Why is this happening to me?” And sometimes, it has been with a sense of joy and wonder as in, “What did I do to deserve all of this?”
Today I ask that question out of that place of joy and wonder, but also, because I really want to understand what happened over the years that brought us to this day, in this place - this beautiful sanctuary - within this wonderful congregation, feeling God’s blessings all around.
So, how did we get here?
Many of us know the story: with the help of the Peachtree Christian Church, a small group of people gathered in a converted house on Colonial Drive on Mother’s Day 1948 and chartered a new church, a mission c ... | | |
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| | Responsibility | |
| By Brad Miller on5/12/2010 3:46 PM | |
| Greetings!
Every once in a while, when I experience something new, or see how something has changed, I think about my grandparents. This may seem odd to some, but there is logic behind it. My grandfather’s both died in 1963 and one of my grandmother’s died in 1965. In the years since their passing, the world has changed tremendously. Sometimes that’s good; sometimes it’s not. But these are people that I knew and loved and who lived in my lifetime. Yet their experience of the world and my experience of the world are wildly different. Just the technology alone would astound and amaze them. Cable and satellite TV, television stations that never go off the air (does anyone remember stations signing off at the end of their broadcast day, playing the national anthem, and showing a test pattern all night long?). Cell phones, computers, air travel that is commonplace, electric cars, solar panels, mp3 players….I could go on and on. But it’s not just technology that I think they’d be in ... | | |
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